


a mountain you scale without thinking of size

by beetsnbees



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Season/Series 01, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 03:01:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13378734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetsnbees/pseuds/beetsnbees
Summary: You dream of dancing. In the dream you are whole, unshattered. Your knee has not been smashed, not in the car crash, not at your hands.Kat Rance and recovery.





	a mountain you scale without thinking of size

You dream of dancing. In the dream you are whole, unshattered. Your knee has not been smashed, not in the car crash, not by your own hands. You are alone on stage dancing, illuminated in soft white light. _Jetée, pliée, arabesque, pirouette._ The steps are as easy to you as breathing. You glide across the stage with grace, feet barely touching the floor. And then:  a hand in your hand. Another person dancing on stage with you, beside you, where moments ago there was only empty space. She didn’t come in through the wings, didn’t come from backstage, didn’t cross the stage to where she is beside you. In the logic of dreams she is here where a moment ago she was not. You dance together, a dance you do not recognize but one that you know the choreography to.

It’s only after you wake up, knee stiff and aching, that you realize you were dancing with Julia. You feel sick for a moment, and you want to cry at the injustice of it all. You don’t. Casey, in the bed beside yours, is sleeping peacefully for once and you don’t want to wake her up. Sleep is rare in your family these days.  More than once you’ve gone downstairs in the middle of the night to see your mom sitting at the kitchen table, or your dad at his desk in the living room, or Casey curled up in an armchair looking blankly out the window. You’ve all got your separate territories in this house, borders that exist only after dark that you all take care not to cross. You prefer to sit outside.

Tonight, as you pad down the stairs, you see the soft glow of the kitchen light. Mom’s awake then. As you pass the entrance to the kitchen you see her sitting at the kitchen table, her back to you, her shoulders shaking softly. You dad is sitting across from her, holding her hand, a mug of tea in front of him. He looks up at you as you pause in the doorway and shakes his head gently at you. You understand. It gets to you sometimes, the guilt of what happened to Mom and Casey. How you didn’t notice. How you called the police and let her escape, giving that thing more time to sink it’s claws in your baby sister, leaving it more time to fester in her. You can’t imagine the guilt Mom feels, the guilt Casey feels. The things the demon—and you still can’t really believe that it was a _demon,_ that demons are _real_ —made them do. You can’t imagine the violation.

You keep walking through the house. You pass through the living room and grab a blanket from the couch on your way through. You unlock the front door and step out onto the porch, closing the door behind you as quietly as you can. You wrap the blanket around your shoulders and look out at the trees surrounding the house. You watch the sun rise slowly, watch the sky lighten from orange, to pink, to the palest blue.  You don’t know how long you’ve been sitting here. Time is less tangible in these moments and you could have been sitting here in the early morning chill for a few minutes or a few hours. At some point your dad sat down next to you and handed you a mug of tea; earl grey, more milk than anything else, just the way you like it. You don’t ask about Mom, about why he’s awake this early. You assume she’s gone back to bed. You assume she had another nightmare, or hadn’t ever gone to sleep in the first place.

 He doesn’t ask you either and you’re grateful. You don’t think that you would be able to talk about it, how you miss Jules the way you miss dancing. How her absence feels like a missing limb sometimes.  Besides, you had never told him what she was to you. You hadn’t told anyone. Besides, you aren’t really sure what she was to you either. The two of you were—you were friends at the very least. You think that you would have been more if—if you hadn’t—if the car hadn’t—if the _demon_ hadn’t— You had only kissed once, before that night. You had both been drunk after a performance, sitting in some alley behind some bar, laughing hysterically at something some idiot had said to you at the bar. The memory is hazy. You don’t remember why Julia had stopped laughing, or why she had taken your face in her hands. You only know that you leaned in and she hadn’t pulled back and then you were kissing her and she was kissing you and you were drunk and happy and kissing her. Allison had come out to find you guys and Julia had only beamed at her and said “we’re so _drunk_!” and the two of you started laughing again and Allison sighed and you all went back into the loud bar and drank more of the cheap beer and went home eventually, to the house where Mom was still happy and Dad wasn’t a shell of the man you knew and Casey still slept through the night without nightmares of things her body had done. So yeah, you were friends and maybe if things had turned out differently you would have been more. But they didn’t, and she died, and she’s _dead,_ and you don’t know why you’re thinking about this at 5 a.m.

 You don’t know how you would have told any of this to your dad and the two of you sit in silence, listening to the birds, and you’re grateful.

You—you _like_ Guelph, in a way you never imagined that you would have when you first moved here. It’s small—a lot smaller than Chicago was, but still big enough to be considered a city. You take classes at the university here, and you fit in with the other college kids for the most part. When they ask about the leg brace, about the cane, you tell them about the car crash. Not Julia, not the fact that a demon stepped into the middle of the road to ruin your family’s life, but what you tell them is close enough to the truth that you don’t feel like you’re lying. You become friends with the girl in your psychology class, the girl in your contemporary art class. You build a life and tell yourself that it won’t be ripped away from you like your old life was. You go to the movies on weekends, you go to Casey’s lacrosse games. You force yourself to believe that this is permanent, that this won’t crumble to dust any second. You pretend that you’re not constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On Sundays you stay home while the rest of your family goes to church. They take comfort in the ritual of it, find some meaning in the bible passages recited by the elderly priest. You don’t, not anymore. You haven’t for a long time, if you’re being honest with yourself. Even before the whole _possession_ thing, you didn’t find much comfort in church, and you still don’t, even now, knowing that at least some aspect of it is real. Instead, you clean the house, or do the readings you put off all weekend, or call the girl from you psychology class and talk about nothing and everything until your family comes home.

You like to think that you’ll be okay someday. You like to think that one day you’ll all be okay. You know it won’t be easy, but you like to think that it's possible. For right now though, it's enough to sit on the porch with your dad, a mug of cooling tea in your hands, a blanket around your shoulders, and watch the day begin.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on tumblr at kctehbishop


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